What A Day

It was both a very good day in the Cox house today, and a very sad day.

I would like to start with the sad new, so that this post can end on a happy note.

The January before we moved from Colorado Springs to Willcox, we bought the girls a late Christmas present. We had promised them, especially Sydney, that we would get them each one of the African dwarf frogs we had been eying in the mall. We purchased our two frogs and within 24 hours, Sydney's passed away. Because of the guarantee, we were able to get another frog. That one died just about a week later.

Well, to make a long story short, counting that first frog that Sydney had, she has lost five or six pets, and Susannah's frog was still going strong.

Well, this morning we had to break the sad news to the kids. Susannah's frog died sometime yesterday. We had him close to 5 1/2 years. According to wikipedia, these frogs live a maximum of 5 years in captivity. We suspect he died of old age, but it was still sad for all of us, Martin and Susannah especially. The funeral will be tomorrow if anyone would like to join us. ;)

OK, so now onto the good news. In one of my last posts, the one about Sydney, number 2 was about her story being published in Creative Kids magazine. Well, we have received our free copy of the magazine and have had the chance to read "Sydney's Time Machine". How exciting it was to read her story in an actual magazine. I have to call tomorrow to order extra copies of the magazine to give to family, her third grade teacher, and the elementary school. They have all requested copies of the magazine. Now I guess it depends on how many copies of the magazine I can get. They said they go pretty fast, but I didn't figure they would be open today.

The other good part of our day was that we had "Cox Family Craft Day". It had been so long since I had taken the time to actually scrapbook, with the exception of the convention. It was long overdue. My problem is that I always feel guilty because I know that there are many other things I should be doing. So, since today was the craft day, tomorrow is "Cox Family Cleaning Day". The girls were informed that if they participated in the craft day, that they also have to participate in the cleaning day. The other rules are that there is no fighting allowed on craft day and on cleaning day they aren't allowed to say, "My arms are tired." That has always been their phrase to try to get out of cleaning. They can say it tomorrow once all the work is finished, but they can't say it in the process of the cleaning. Keep your fingers crossed for us. ;)

So, for the craft day Sydney and Susannah painted with watercolors, used modeling clay to make some very interesting things, and they also did some scrapbooking. I will take pictures hopefully tomorrow and show off their goods.

I got quite a bit of scrapbooking done. I got 12 pages mostly done. I just need to pull out the new Cricut and get some titles done. Since I only have one cartridge so far, I will probably use the computer to make some of the titles as well. Then I have the journaling to finish. I will post a few pages when I complete them as well.

Our plan for the summer, since I have three day weekends, is that we will have a cleaning day on Saturday, craft day on Sunday, and Monday will be our day for errands or trips to Tucson, the mountains, etc. Hopefully it will work out good for us, and since the cleaning will be done before the crafts, maybe I will get more done and have less guilt.